"I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

"I don't think ... I have to show you, here, the relationship between archery and the writer's art.  I have already warned against thinking on targets."

"Not to write, for many of us, is to die."

"I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy.  Two days and I am in tremor.  Three and I suspect lunacy.  Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.  An hour's writing is tonic.  I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats."

"With Art as forceps, pull that Truth."

"Find Art.

Seize brush.  Take stance.  Do fancy footwork.  Dance.

Run race.  Try poem.  Write play."

"Writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed."

"While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."

"Doing is being.

To have done's not enough;

To stuff yourself with doing—that's the game.

To name yourself each hour by what's done,

To tabulate your time at sunset's gun

And find yourself in acts

You could not know before the facts"

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.  It cannot precede action.  It is the chart that remains when an action is through.  That is all Plot ever should be.  It is human desire let run, running, and reach a goal.  It cannot be mechanical.  It can only be dynamic."

"Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do."

"The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reflect the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews.  He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation.  He must ask himself, 'What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?' and begin to pour this on paper." (artist)

"Everywhere we look: problems.  Everywhere we further look: solutions.  The children of men, the children of time, how can they not be fascinated with these challenges?  Thus: science fiction and its recent history."

"How does one get lost?  Through incorrect aims, as I have said.  Through wanting literary fame too quickly.  From wanting money too soon.  If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths."

"You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas?  Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.  Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day."

"As soon as things get difficult, I walk away.  That's the great secret of creativity.  You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.  If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it.  You've got to say, 'Well, to hell with you.'  And the cat says, 'Wait a minute.  He's not behaving the way most humans do.'  Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: 'Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?'  Well, that's what an idea is.  See?  You just say, 'Well, hell, I don't need depression.  I don't need worry.  I don't need to push.'  The ideas will follow me.  When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them."

"A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and—voilà!  We are the Creator!  Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!  Nothing could be further from true creativity.  Nothing could be more destructive."

"In order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture.  If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won." (artist)

"DON'T THINK.  Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity."

"What we all have in us ... t it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice.  When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh.  How strange—we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.  The Muse, to belabor the point then, is there, a fantastic storehouse, our complete being.  All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth."

I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.

"I had a 260-page screenplay [for Something Wicked This Way Comes].  That's six hours.  [Director] Jack [Clayton] said, 'Well, now you've got to cut out forty pages.'  I said, 'God, I can't.'  He said, 'Go ahead, I know you can do it.  I'll be behind you.'  So I cut forty pages out.  He said, 'Okay, now you've got to cut another forty pages out.'  I got it down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, 'Thirty more.'  I said, 'Impossible, impossible!'  Okay, I got it down to 150 pages.  And Jack said, 'Thirty more.'  Well, he kept telling me I could do it, and, by God, I went through a final time and got it down to 120 pages.  It was better."

"I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation.  I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own.  Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs."

"Writing is survival.  Any art, any good work, of course, is that."

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us?  First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that is a gift and a privilege, not a right.  We must earn life once it has been awarded us.  Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation."

"In hesitation is thought.  In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping."

"Just seeing excellent films doesn't educate you at all, because they're mysterious.  A great film is mysterious.  There's no way of solving it.  Why does Citizen Kane work?  Well, it just does.  It's brilliant on very level, and there's no way of putting your finger on any on thing that's right.  It's just all right.  But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: 'I'll never do that, and I'll never do that, and I'll never do that.'"

"My ideas drove me to it, you see.  The more I did, the more I wanted to do.  You grow ravenous.  You run fevers.  You know exhilarations.  You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed.  It is a grand way to live."

"Yell.  Jump.  Play.  Out-run those sons-of-bitches.  They'll never live the way you live.  Go do it."

"Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.  A variation of this is true for writers."

Zen in the Art of Writing

Ray Bradbury - "Telling the Truth"

"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting or living itself, which is the greatest art of all ... creativity, at heart, is the essence of man's being."

"That's what I want for you! To surprise yourself, not know what you're going to do next, what you're going to write next."

"Again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion or my Ouija subconscious again."

"I don't write things to benefit the world.  If it happens that they do, swell."

"I found myself blessing the secret mind... observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.  We never sit anything out.  We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.  The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"I want you to envy me my joy. ... Say 'am I being joyful?'" (artist)

"If you're in the middle of writing and you go blank, stop it.  And your mind says 'no, that's it.'  You’re being warned.  Your subconscious is saying 'I don't like you anymore.  You're writing about things I don't give a damn for.'" (artist)

"Write a short story every week.  It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."

"I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.  I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.  And out of that love, remake a world."

"The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year."

"It's gotta be with a great sense of fun!  Writing is not a serious business.  It's a joy and a celebration.  You should be having fun at it.  Ignore the authors who say, 'oh, my god, what work.'  No, to hell with that!  ...If it's work, stop it, and do something else."

"Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don't schedule it.  It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this." (artist)

"You must write every single day of your life.  You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next."